About Me

My photo
I have a burning need to know stuff and I love asking awkward questions.

Saturday, December 30, 2017

Learning a language is resolution for one in five Brits, survey says.

From The BBC

29 December 2017

Learning a language will be a new year's resolution for about one in five Britons in 2018, a survey suggests. About one in three said they intend to learn at least some key phrases. Spanish was the most popular language among 2,109 UK adults questioned by Populus for the British Council. "If we are to remain globally competitive post-Brexit, we need more people who can speak languages," said British Council schools advisor, Vicky Gough.

Of the representative sample of adults polled:

64% said they had always wanted to speak another language fluently
56% said they regretted never having made the effort to do so
58% agreed it was more important than ever for people in the UK to learn another language but only a third said they could currently hold a basic conversation in one
45% were embarrassed by their poor language skills.

In November, a British Council report identified Spanish, followed by Mandarin, French, Arabic and German, as being the most important language for Britons to master as Brexit approaches. The organisation warns that uptake of languages in schools continues to fall with official figures indicating a 7.3 percentage point fall in the number of pupils in England, Wales and Northern Ireland taking GCSE exams in languages in the past year. In Scotland, official figures show a similar falls in numbers taking French and German qualifications.

A report by MPs has estimated that poor language skills in the workforce costs the UK economy £50bn a year in lost export opportunities. Businesses struggle to fill posts that require language skills said the report from the All Party Parliamentary Group on modern languages. The MPs called for a national recovery programme to improve language skills. Ms Gough said the New Year was the perfect time for budding linguists to get started. "It is fantastic that many of us hope to brush up on our language skills in 2018," said Ms Gough. "The languages we are most keen to learn are some of the languages the UK needs most. But the country is still facing a languages deficit."

[I’m definitely not one for New Year’s Resolutions but I have been thinking of learning an alternate language for some time now. Presently, and most embarrassingly, I can only speak one language fairly fluently – my own. But at least when ‘abroad’ I do make some effort to at least be able to say ‘hello’, ‘goodbye’ and ‘thank you’ in the language of where I’m staying. I can even, if pushed, hold a brief ‘conversation’ in French as long as we don’t discuss anything more than ordering a drink or asking directions. I’ve even successfully ordered something in Portuguese and managed to say thank you afterwards which I’m still impressed by. But anyway – I’m thinking Cantonese for 2018. Partially because there’s a Chinese contractor at work I can get to correct my undoubtedly poor pronunciation and, probably like everywhere else on the planet, my local university is drowning in Chinese students and you really can’t help bumping into them. I’ll probably give up after some easy words/phrases but you never know….. If my sister can learn conversational French (spending her summers at her property in France helps) and my brother can say a few words in various Eastern European languages to say hi to people at his gym I’m sure that I can shoot the breeze in Cantonese. We’ll see……] 

6 comments:

Mudpuddle said...

i've been bemused by the great variation among foreign language learners; some seem to pick them up almost effortlessly and others... well, it's a great struggle for us... but good luck with Chinese: it would certainly be a valuable skill, and would be recompensive in many ways...

Stephen said...

Well, you have a little start with the profanity from Firefly..

CyberKitten said...

@ Mudpuddle: I was OK with French in school and 'got by' with what little I learned during a week in Paris on my own. I also did a crash-course in German which I found rather difficult and I've forgotten most of that. I'm not a natural language person (I don't think) but I do know people who seem to pick it up very easily.

@ Stephen: Indeed! What an excuse to watch the series again!!!!

Brian Joseph said...

Good luck with your learning endeavor. I think that Cantonese is a great choice to learn.

I spoke and read Italian fairly well for awhile. Unfortunately I have lost much of it due to disuse. I need to get up to speed with that.

Happy New Years!

Stephen said...

@Brian: Italian? Fun! I tried to learn it in second grade, but without pronunciation guides I was lost.

For European languages, DuoLingo as a language learning game is helpful. They also feature other languages like Japanese, Hebrew, and "Chinese",but with those you also have to practice writing another script, and the game doesn't help with that so much. I don't kn ow if the Chinese is Mandarin or Cantonese.

CyberKitten said...

The reason I picked Cantonese rather than Mandarin is because the woman @ work who is one of our contractors is Hong Kong Chinese - hence Cantonese. I wanted someone I could practice my (no doubt) bad accent on!